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Earlier quoted context omitted.
LKY ruled from 1959-1990. Singapore's GDP over that time grew at a 14% compound annual growth rate: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SGP/singapore/gdp-gros... .
14% year on year when your GDP is close to zero to begin with is not that impressive, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotta say, housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at. Here in Australia, it has become an investment vehicle; a huge amount of housing stock is empty while a third of the population are living in very poor accommodation.
The approach that seems to work is to give economically elastic things to the free market, and make economically inelastic things (housing, medical care, etc) a responsibility of the state. It's difficult to tell if this is the case as we can only look at macroeconomic effects in hindsight, and this approach would have many problems at scale, but this seems to be the most beneficial approach for society long term?
Rent collected for buildings/management/amenities goes to landlord, rent collected for the physical land upon which the building exists (which is valuable not because of the landlord) is recouped by the community as tax.
There are a few key things to bear in mind about Singapore's growth model and success: * The proximity of power to population because it is a tiny city state. Singaporean governance is under extreme pressure to be effective because if it fails it cannot hide. This is a systemic issue that can be seen all around the world and is probably why some countries moved their capitals AWAY from population centres (e.g. brazil…
I was going to type a disagree until you edited that last bit. I don't mind the authoritarianism, since the authorities seem very proactive towards encouraging foreign tech startups, but creativity is near zero and heavily sanitized, and most devs are poorly treated, I guess due to the massive glut of technical folks for the tiny population it has. Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. Going to Lond…
Last time I went to Singapore I was struck by how it was impossible to buy any local music. I associate by music, so I always buy local music when I travel. But in Singapore's tiny music stores, I couldn't even find a Dick Lee CD for sale, and his music wasn't available through Australian iTunes.
(In the end I emailed his website asking which stores to try, and instead they sent one of his personal assistants to my Singapore hotel in person to hand deliver one of their remaining CD copies. For which my family were deeply grateful, we had discovered him 25 years earlier on a cassette we bought of The Mad Chinaman, and as a little Aussie kid I'd learned all the words of Rasa Sayang: "Everything we have has to be the best of the fabulous east and the wonderful west".)
Lately I've started to find Singaporean bands on Bandcamp, so things are improving. But it wasn't like I could walk into Starbucks and find CDs from a bunch of emerging local artists at the counter. I'm heartbroken that the 100th Starbucks store near The Fullerton Waterboat House has apparently closed too.
> forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
The trick is distinguishing between what is truly pragmatic and not merely ruthless. One wonders if some of the illiberal policies like caning are regional necessities or minor pathologies that did not overwhelm the overall trend towards liberalization.
The article failed to mention 1 important thing: LKY built an incorruptible government. With all the power he had, he could have done so much better for his family if he just tried, but that wouldn't necessarily be good for the country. A lot of countries want to be Singapore, but few have a leader of his caliber.
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This is achieved largely by the government sponsoring the most promising/brilliant students to study in top Western universities and offering them quite competitive pay packages to join the government.
The Indian government's elite corps (IAS) as a contrasting example are also composed of similarly brilliant people (including some of my own classmates), but this is restricted to only the people at the very top of the hierarchy and capability doesn't penetrate deep into bulk of the government, nor is compensation as competitive which promotes corruption.
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I live in Vietnam and I've always been surprised at the large number of Singaporean tech companies that open up development offices in Vietnam. And it isn't (just) to save money on salaries. The average quality of a Singaporean developer is shockingly bad for such an educated, developed country. And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!
Vietnam has twenty times the population of Singapore; it's not surprising that it'd be easier to find good developers there. It's also harder for good Vietnamese developers to emigrate to somewhere with better pay like the US, compared to Singaporean developers. >And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here! I know some mainland Chinese who…
And it has majority of its population living in small towns, and villages, some of which don't even have a single cellphone tower.
0ne of the pieces many articles discussing Singapore miss is actually the quality of the people in the Government officer corps. This i think makes a massive amount of difference in that a lot of what's planned in infrastructure and processes is much better thought out and executed than in other countries. It's the equivalent of the 10X programmer philosophy. This is achieved largely by the government sponsoring the…
It may be anecdotal, but in my experience the officers of the Union Public Services are in most cases not particularly brilliant, as you may expect from a examination and qualification system that prioritizes rote learning. (my anecdotal sample size being 3-4 IPS officers, 5-6 IAS officers and a couple of other officers of the lesser known services, i.e. IRS, IDAS, IFS, etc.)
of possible interest to Star Trek fans: "This character was only mentioned in dialogue. Lee Kuan shares naming elements with Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Singapore in the 1960s. Lee established a hybrid form of governance with democratic and authoritarian elements." https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Lee_Kuan